


First Night

by Lady_in_Red



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Cooking, Daddy Issues, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Holidays, Traditions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:08:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22092337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_in_Red/pseuds/Lady_in_Red
Summary: Jaime rushes home to spent his first holiday with Brienne, and reflects on holidays growing up with Tywin Lannister.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 26
Kudos: 232
Collections: Sevenmas & Other Winter Holidays





	First Night

**Author's Note:**

> So I've sort of adapted Hanukkah to Westeros, with 7 nights of candles, one for each aspect of the 7, lighting up the Long Night and driving away the dark. Alas I couldn't manage to finish it before Hanukkah, and indeed the year, ended.

Jaime practically danced through the crush of people on the subway platform. Tired commuters getting off the trains, and families dressed for holiday celebrations getting on. The streets were lined with lights, a single candle flickering in the windows of each house he passed. 

Tywin Lannister had never lit candles. He didn’t believe in the old superstitions or the Seven, much less the Lord of Light or the Others. For him the Long Night was an unnecessary week of reduced productivity and an excuse to throw a party to remind Westeros of his wealth and power. 

Jaime checked his watch and fished his keys from his pocket as he hurried up the front steps of their building. He’d promised Brienne he would be home by seven, but he’d left the office early, eager to spend the evening with her. New beginnings, rebirth, the end of darkness. It seemed appropriate for the first holiday he spent with Brienne. Jaime was looking forward to lighting the first candle, making an offering to the Mother, and listening to Brienne’s stories about her childhood. 

When the elevator door opened on the fourth floor, Jaime immediately smelled smoke. If it was this strong on the first night, he couldn’t imagine what it would be like the seventh night. 

The smell intensified when he opened their apartment door, though no candles flickered in their windows. The room was cold, as if the windows had been open earlier. “Brienne?” Jaime called.

The smoke detector was lying on the coffee table, its battery yanked out, and beyond that their small dining table was set with her mother’s ornate china plates and heavy silverware. 

“Jaime? You’re early.” Her voice sounded odd, but it was definitely coming from the kitchen. 

“The office was dead, so I caught an earlier train.” He’d thought maybe he could help her with dinner. He could just about manage to boil water, stir ingredients, or read a recipe. Odds were he’d just pour her a drink and get in the way, like most nights, but he was still grateful to be home, in their cozy apartment far from Tywin Lannister and his performative largesse. 

The first night of seven nights of the Long Night was always held in the ballroom at Casterly Rock, select employees of the company mingling with the Lannister family so Tywin could bestow gifts and bonuses before an audience. Jaime was eight before he realized that Gerolt with his pockets full of peppermint candies was the head of accounting, not a distant cousin. While books were the traditional gift of the first night, that year Jaime was given a history of the Lannisters and forced to read the entire thing over his school break, sitting in his father’s office being quizzed at random intervals. 

Something loud clattered in the kitchen and Brienne cursed. Jaime shrugged out of his coat and hung it in the closet. “Is everything alright? Can I help?”

“Um, can you get the fire going?” Brienne answered, water running in the sink followed by a cloud of steam escaping the kitchen. 

“Sure,” Jaime answered, itching to go into the kitchen and see what she was doing. It didn’t smell like the traditional meal of boar stew, fresh bread, and dark beer, not that he’d ever eaten a traditional Long Night meal. Tywin Lannister served whole roasted boars at his parties, with exotic fruits from Essos and the Summer Isles, the finest vintages of Arbor Gold, and intricately shaped loaves of bread made to look like lions’ heads or the Iron Throne. 

Below the smoke he could smell meat and yeast, but char was the predominant aroma. He crouched in front of the fireplace and thanked the Smith once again for inventing gas fireplaces. Two twists of a knob and a cheery blaze radiated warmth into the room. His task accomplished, Jaime went down the hall and changed out of his suit into soft pants and a sweatshirt from their vacation on Tarth. 

Brienne was still in the kitchen when he returned. Jaime peeked around the edge of the doorway. Brienne’s back was to him, familiar and broad, an apron tied around her waist. Her hair was caught up in a messy bun atop her head, the back of her neck flushed a mottled red. 

The hood light over the stove illuminated a large haunch of meat, nearly blackened, with coarsely chopped potatoes and carrots arranged around the bottom, a bit burnt around the edges. A pot busily bubbled away, steam rising. The countertops were strewn with flour and two brown lumps resting on cooling racks. Brienne was usually such a tidy cook, cleaning up as she went, that it was jarring to see the counters cluttered. It always drove Jaime mad. He liked a bit of chaos when he cooked, and rarely stuck to recipes. 

“What’s this? Some kind of flatbread?” he asked, padding into the kitchen behind her. The misshapen masses were irregularly browned, blackened along one edge, and coarse salt pooled in the divots of one bread. He couldn’t rightly call them loaves.

A sniffle caught his attention and Jaime turned. Brienne was steadfastly gazing down at the lump of dough she was kneading in her strong hands, her forearms dusted with flour. Her freckled face was pink and her cheeks moist. “Brienne?” 

“They’re lions,” she said stiffly. “Just get a drink and go wait in the living room.” 

Now that she said it, he could vaguely see possibly a face on one of the lumps, and maybe a mane, but it was all smooshed together and browned in odd places. Jaime touched her shoulder and she flinched. “You didn’t have to do that. I thought we were having beer bread and stew, lighting a candle, and exchanging gifts.” 

Her shoulders slumped, and a tear trailed down her cheek. Brienne reached up and brushed it ruthlessly away with the back of her hand, leaving a floury smear on her skin. “It’s your first holiday away from your family. I wanted to do some of your traditions, too.”

“Oh, honey, if I wanted that I’d be at Casterly Rock.” How very Brienne to care about his holiday traditions enough to try to replicate them. Jaime stepped up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. “None of that had anything to do with me or the family. It was all about Tywin.” 

Brienne pushed away the blob of dough she’d been kneading. Her hands were covered in flour and bits of dough. “This looked easy on TV.”

Jaime dropped a kiss on her shoulder. “Everything looks easy with a full crew and enough editing.” He squeezed her and then let her go. “I think we can still turn this roast into stew. You have your dad’s beer bread recipe, right?” 

Brienne nodded slowly. “Yeah, it’s in my phone.” 

“I’ll get the stew going, you do the bread. We’ll have dinner on the table before you know it.” He sounded more confident than he felt, but things tended to work out when they worked together. 

In less than ten minutes bread was baking in the oven, stew was bubbling on the stove, and they were standing by the window lighting the first candle to drive away the darkness. Jaime only half-remembered the prayers, but Brienne’s voice was steady and sure, her hands gentle as she laid a small bouquet of flowers beneath the candle as an offering to the Mother. 

He brought them both bottles of oatmeal stout from Tarth, and curled up close beside Brienne on the couch. She relaxed against him, both watching the fire. It wasn’t quite the same, no crackling and popping of wood, but it was close enough. 

“You know I don’t need any of that, right?” he asked quietly. 

Brienne leaned forward to set her bottle on the side table, and stayed separated from him until he tugged her back. “I just wanted tonight to be perfect,” she sighed.

“Let me tell you a secret. My father’s holiday parties? Smoke and mirrors. Sure, they looked perfect, but behind the scenes were plenty of broken wine glasses, burned bread, and vendors that showed up hours late. Tywin even had a spare tux hidden in a room off-limits to guests in case his got stained or wrinkled.” Jaime had a spare as well. He couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t own a tuxedo. One of his earliest memories was of being fitted for a new tux and so terrified of incurring his father’s wrath that he stood with a pin in his ankle for half an hour before the tailor noticed blood. His father locked him in his room without dinner for ruining the pants. 

“That sounds …” Her words trailed off, as if the right one was just out of reach. 

Jaime could supply a number of options. Cold, isolating, harsh. He was starting to allow himself to add  _ abusive  _ to the list sometimes. 

“Lonely,” she settled on, startling him. 

Jaime was about to protest. Cersei had been with him for so much of that time, until Tywin put Robert in her path and she decided that Baratheon was the lesser of two evils. Since then he’d been the sole focus of his father’s ambitions and schemes. Until he met Brienne. 

“It was,” he allowed. “I have no right to complain--”

“Why not?” She turned to face him, their legs tangled up and her warm body pressed against his side. She’d taken off her apron, leaving her in flowing black slacks and a gauzy blue blouse with a long string of turquoise beads around her neck. Elegant and utterly overdressed for a simple meal at home. He couldn’t help but stroke his hand along her neck, her exposed collarbone, and down her arm. 

“Well, I had everything I needed: a house so big whole wings went unused, the best schools, food and clothing and tutors and travel.” Jaime was used to rattling off all the evidence of his privilege. Tywin had assured they always had the best, most expensive version of anything they wanted. 

“What about love? Affection? I’ve met your father, Jaime. He was about as warm as the Wall.” She sounded angry about that, as well she should. 

Jaime had never intended to inflict his father on Brienne. Tywin had arranged to “accidentally” run into his son and his son’s new girlfriend about a month after their friendship turned romantic. Jaime had already been halfway in love with her by then, but afterward he was all the way there. She’d been perfectly polite to Tywin, but she didn’t let him bait her or intimidate her. Nor did she attempt to flatter him or ingratiate herself, like other women had in Jaime’s past. Most of those women had been set-ups concocted by his father, even the ones he’d thought he met on his own. 

“Love is weakness.” He could hear his own voice taking on his father’s haughty chill. “That’s what he always said. My mother was his only weakness, and when she died, he refused to make the same mistake again. Money never sickened, never died, never left him. With careful tending, it always grew, always made him more powerful and important.”

“More alone,” Brienne countered. 

Jaime released a shaky breath. “Yes. Alone in his castle on the cliffs surrounded by his hoard of gold. I never want to be him, Brienne.”

She smiled at that. “You couldn’t be if you tried.”

Jaime laughed softly. “Probably not. I have a heart.” A bleeding heart, according to his father, far too concerned with the welfare of others. That Jaime had been trained from childhood at the very schools Tywin chose to see protecting others as his duty was immaterial. Family was meant to come first, last, and always, even if Tywin Lannister treated his family like a business venture, and an unsuccessful one at that. 

Brienne rested her hand against his chest, over his heart. “A heart so big even I fit in it,” she said with a self-deprecating smile.

“Don’t do that,” Jaime chided. “I love every inch of you, even the bits you hate. Especially those bits.” He leaned in to kiss the bump on the bridge of her nose where it had been broken. 

“How about the parts that can’t cook? I somehow burned and undercooked the meat, and I have no idea what I did to the bread but it didn’t look good and I doubt it tasted any better,” Brienne grumbled. 

Jaime shrugged. “This will be the best authentic First Night dinner I’ve ever had, I’m sure.”

Brienne side-eyed him. “Only because it’s the only one you’ve ever had.”

“Technically true,” Jaime conceded. Tywin had always turned up his nose at “peasant fare,” keeping a Pentoshi cook on staff at Casterly Rock, flying in exotic ingredients to impress his dinner guests. Jaime used to sneak out and buy fast food, and kept peanut butter and bread in his bedroom for nights when he couldn’t stomach eating whatever fussy dish was trendy at the moment. 

But despite Brienne’s skepticism, their dinner was indeed hands down the best First Night meal he’d ever had, if only because they ate their bowls of thick stew and chunks of beer bread sitting on the couch watching a favorite TV series with terrible plotting but excellent fight scenes. Jaime much preferred it to spending the evening praying to the Mother that he wouldn’t spill anything on his tux or crack a joke with the wrong person and precipitate an international incident. 

After the single candle guttered out and their bowls were empty, they exchanged gifts. For Brienne, a beautifully illustrated book of tales from the Age of Heroes, and for Jaime the latest in a detective series about a curmudgeonly amputee and his angelic partner. They read particularly good lines aloud to each other, curled up together under thick blankets in front of the fire. 

At some point, Brienne stopped reacting to the lines he read, her book lying facedown on her chest. He should wake her so they could go to bed, but Jaime was too comfortable to move. He set his book carefully down and closed his eyes. 

He couldn’t remember a better holiday, and he couldn’t wait to celebrate the remaining six nights with Brienne. 

  
  



End file.
